Let’s face it—it does no good to build a funnel and spend zero time optimizing for conversion. That’s a no-brainer, right?

But, how many of you are working closely with your head of sales to ensure that the opportunities you help generate actually convert into paying clients? Ultimately, if you want to be seen as a successful marketer, you’re going to have to show that marketing is driving sales.

Now, the challenge is that in today’s commoditized world, sales teams often struggle to stand out from the crowd. As a result, closed won rates plummet, and organizations find it challenging to demonstrate to prospects how their total value proposition is the clear winner against all of the other competitors.

To make matters worse, many organizations rely on “super hero” sales people or even the founder to close deals. This approach is not sustainable or scalable. You can’t build a successful sales team if you’re constantly relying on a select few individuals to bring in all of the business.

The solution to this problem is a sales process that follows a standardized approach while also creating clear differentiation with prospects at the same time. By implementing a systematic sales process, you can scale your sales efforts beyond just the founders and “super heroes.” This will lead to higher closed won rates and higher gross profit margins, as you’ll be able to win at premium prices.

The benefits of a systematic sales process are clear. You’ll be able to scale the process beyond founders and “super heroes,” achieve higher closed won rates, and enjoy higher gross profit margins as you’re now able to win at premium prices.

When I implemented a systematic sales process in my former agency, I was able to consistently have 60-70% closed won rates, even when I had zero involvement in deals. This is the power of a well-designed sales process. In fact, I standardized this process and called it the Systematic Sales Process.

So, what does a Systematic Sales Process look like? Here are the five stages:

Stage 1: Evaluation

In this stage, you’ll have a 30-45 minute call with your prospect. The goal of this call is to point your prospect in the right direction—it’s not to “make a sale.” The reason we want to take this approach is that many prospects are likely not a good fit for your firm, so let’s not assume that every first call is an “opportunity.” That’s why we call this call the “Evaluation”—you want to evaluate whether or not you can help your prospect, whether or not they align with your requirements, and whether or not they are ready to move forward. We call this “two-way qualification.”

It’s not uncommon to reach the middle-to-end of the call and determine that your prospect, in fact, needs someone or something else other than you!

IMPORTANT: You should NOT move anyone beyond this point unless you have full alignment.

Do this stage right and you will ensure that your pipeline is real.

Stage 2: Discovery

After you have alignment with your prospect from the Evaluation call, you’ll engage them and their team in a 60-120 minute Discovery meeting.

The key in this meeting is to have a strong business conversation and less of a tactical conversation related to what you do. You’re looking to create paradigm shifts with key stakeholders on your prospect’s side. You want them to leave the meeting thinking about their problem in a completely different way and with a sense of excitement about the potential of moving from where they are now to where they want to be.

IMPORTANT: You want to ensure critical stakeholders are present for this meeting, as they’ve agreed-to in the Evaluation call (this is non-negotiable), to whatever degree you require for your process.

Do this stage right and you will sub-consciously win the business.

Stage 3: Plan

In this stage, you’ll collaborate with your main point of contact to develop your plan. That said, be a leader and show them what needs to be done to achieve their desired outcome, then discuss how you can divide and conquer together. Don’t treat this as a “pick from a menu” excercise.

This collaborative approach to developing your plan helps your main point of contact see your plan as their plan, too. This increases the odds that they will be a champion for you.

IMPORTANT: During these dicsussions, be sure to have them help you avoid “land mines”—things that could lose the business for you.

Do this stage right and you will eliminate surprises at the next stage (Presentation).

Stage 4: Presentation

You’re now ready to present and officially win the business during a 60-90 minute meeting. That siad, do not call your plan a “Proposal”! Instead, give it a specific title that speaks to their goals (e.g. “How ACME Corp Can Drive 17% More Revenue Through Conversion Rate Optimization”).

Your presentation should tell a “story” that includes:

• Their Vision
• Their Goals & Objectives
• Their Challenges
• How to Win (Strategy)
• Highlights (Tactics)
• Required Commitments (Their time, money, and resources to make this plan a success)
• Expected Results (ROI!)
• Why Your Firm

After you present, answer any questions they have and when their questions are done, ASK FOR THE SALE.

IMPORTANT: You want to ensure critical stakeholders are present for this meeting, as they’ve agreed-to in the Evaluation call (this is non-negotiable), to whatever degree you require for your process.

Do this stage right and you will differentiate your firm.

Stage 5: Negotiation

Finally, you’re ready to provde the contract and negotiate, but don’t give this until they’ve given you the “verbal” that you have won the business. The reason you do this is to make sure that you’ve wont the business based on the material things before the prospect starts nit-picking your contract scope. That said, be clear about what you will do and what you won’t do.

Additionally, your standard terms and conditions will accompnay the scope. You want to know up-front the terms and conditions you will bend on and the ones you won’t bend on.  You don’t want to make a decision about an important term and/or condition during the emotion of trying to ink a deal. Knowing up-front your points of negotiation will help you make logical decisions in the heat of the moment.

Do this stage right and you will set up your team for success.If you’d like to learn more about how to grow your firm using a Systematic Sales Process, register for Frank’s free Systematic Sales Process training today!

The post How Standardizing Your Sales Process Boosts Overall Conversion appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Your marketing clients are just like you.

As a marketing consultant or agency owner, you want to see:

1. More traffic
2. More engagement
3. More subscribers
4. More customers
5. Higher customer lifetime value

These metrics are the foundations of a successful business (whether it’s a marketing agency or an ecommerce drop shipping business). If you don’t have traffic, you won’t have customers. And if you don’t focus on your customer lifetime value, you won’t have a sustainable business model.

This is exactly why these are the metrics your marketing clients want to see. They want to know you’re increasing their brand awareness and marketing to their customers after the first sale. Because that’s how you build a long-term relationship with the brands you work with and create a marketing consultancy that makes people ask, “How the heck did you pull that off?!”

And it all starts with focusing on these 5 metrics and sharing them with your clients.

#1: Traffic

Every marketing client wants to look at their Google Analytics dashboard and see that beautiful up and to the right line that signifies they’re getting more traffic than ever before. Traffic is a huge part of marketing because it leads to the first stage of the Customer Value Journey, Awareness. 

People can’t buy your client’s products if they don’t know their products exist! With increased traffic, more people see their brand. The more people that see their brand, the more people can buy their products.

Just like 1+1 = 2, more traffic leads to more customers. Well, as long as you’re making sure to attract the right kind of traffic. Not only can you show your clients their increased traffic to social media (impressions) or their website (through Google Analytics), but you can also show them the demographics behind this traffic. This shows that these aren’t random people who *might* be interested in buying their products. These visitors are their customer avatar, which means they can quickly turn into customers with the right funnel. 

Here are a few traffic metrics to share with your clients:

• Impressions on social media
• Demographics on social media
• Traffic on Google Analytics
• Demographics on Google Analytics

#2: Engagement

Engagement is the number of likes, comments, shares, and interactions people have with your content. For example, if someone comments on your Instagram post—that’s engagement. If they read your blog post—that’s engagement. If they reply like your tweet—that’s engagement.

And that’s the start of turning a viewer into a customer. Like the Customer Value Journey outlines, the first step in the customer journey is awareness. It’s the moment someone finds out your brand and products exist. It’s a crucial moment, but what’s even more important is what comes afterward… 

…the first time someone actively engages with your brand. 

Engage is the second stage of the Customer Value Journey. It’s so important because it’s like this person just raised their hand and said, “You have products that help me solve one of my problems!” 

Your marketing clients want to see engagement because that tells them you’re doing your job as a marketer. You’re increasing brand awareness to the right people, who are now engaging with their brand so they can move to the next steps of the Customer Value Journey, Subscription, Conversion, Excitement, Ascension, Promotor, and Ambassador.

Here are a few engagement metrics to share with your clients:

• Increased social media engagement per post and on average
• Decreased bounce rate
• Longer time spent on page
• Heat maps of sales and product pages

#3: Subscribers

With traffic and engagement comes subscribers (if you’ve properly built out your marketing funnel!). Your goal as a marketer is to turn traffic into subscribers, building a deeper relationship between brand and customer avatar. You never want to house your audience on someone else’s platform, like Facebook or Google. You want to take your social media or website visitors and add them to your email list as soon as you can.

This is stage 3 of the Customer Value Journey and usually comes alongside a lead magnet freebie that people opt-in for. For example, you could give away a free webinar or a discount on commerce products. 

Your clients want to see that traffic and engagement have a predictable ROI. That predictable ROI comes from knowing, for example, 1% of their subscribers convert. Based on the average number of people subscribing per day, you can predict how many customers and how much revenue they’ll make.

Just like you want your marketing consultancy or agency to have a predictable income, your clients want the same thing, too.

Here are a few subscriber metrics to share with your clients:

• The average number of subscribers per day/week/month
• The average percentage of subscribers becoming customers
• Open rate
• Click-through rate

#4: Customers

This is the metric you probably didn’t need us to tell you about. Of course, your marketing clients want to see more customers! More customers mean they’re getting an ROI from your services. Understandably, this is really important for your clients. They want to see the numbers that prove their money is in good hands.

As a marketing consultant or agency, transparency around these numbers is a huge part of having a healthy, long-term relationship with your clients. Putting together SOPs that help your employees and contractors keep clients in “the know” is worth your time.

And remember—your clients are business owners (or executives). They’ve put their heart, soul, blood, sweat, AND tears into this business. They’ve dedicated late nights and early mornings. They’ve probably missed some pretty important events in their friend’s and family’s lives. This business means a lot to them, and getting to see more customers buying is special.

Make it a special moment for them by creating milestones to celebrate. For example, when they reach 1,000 customers, send them a gift or make sure to take the time to acknowledge it. Or, you can send gifts at certain revenue goals, like their first $500,000. 

Here are a few customer metrics to share with your clients:

• The average number of customers per day/week/month
• The percent increase in customers since you started working with them
• The daily/weekly/monthly revenue 
• Specific milestones (number of customers or revenue generated)

#5: Customer lifetime value

After someone becomes a customer, the marketing doesn’t stop. Conversion isn’t the last stage of the Customer Value Journey for a reason. There are FOUR more stages after it! Conversion is the halfway point of the Customer Value Journey, and there’s a lot that happens afterward.

When someone purchases a product, it’s time to get them excited (stage 5 of the Customer Value Journey). This excitement stage isn’t about upsells. It’s about showing them that they made the right decision by buying from you. This can be an unexpected free training, discount code, or stickers inside their ecommerce package.

Excitement leads to ascension (stage 6 of the Customer Value Journey). In ascension, your customer goes from buying your low-tier or middle-tier package to your highest (or one of your higher) tier packages. At DigitalMarketer, this is when someone goes from being a Lab member to becoming a Certified Partner or buying a ticket to Traffic & Conversion Summit. 

Think of ascension as the ladder that takes your revenue from “Awesome!” to “Holy crap!” This is where you increase customer lifetime value and turn your client’s brand into a long-term, sustainable business. When the funnels are in place to turn first-time customers into multiple-purchasing customers (and eventually raving fans of your brand and products), you’re in the magic zone.

Here are a few customer lifetime metrics to share with your clients:

• The average customer lifetime value (LTV)
• The LTV before and after you started working with this client
• The percentage increase in LTV

How To Get Rehired Again, and Again, and Again

Clients are happy to outsource their marketing to your consultancy or agency. Marketing is a lot of work (you know this as a business owner!), and it’s monumentally easier to have somebody else do it for you. It’s even easier to have the person who’s already doing your marketing…keep doing it.

That’s why you want to show your marketing clients these 5 metrics:

1. Traffic
2. Engagement
3. Subscribers
4. Customers
5. Customer lifetime value

These are the metrics telling your clients that you’re increasing their brand awareness, qualifying leads, and ensuring they don’t build their business on someone else’s platform. They show an ROI when you turn those subscribers into customers and increase their customer lifetime value.

Wouldn’t you want to keep working with the marketer who did this for your company?

The answer is a big, obvious YES.

And with these metrics, that marketer can be you.

The post The 5 Metrics Every Marketing Client Wants to See appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Editor’s Note: This post was pulled from one of Roland Frasier’s Traffic & Conversion Summit talks.

There are 5 things you can do in your business to grow really fast. 

#1: Co-Branding with Product Integration Partnerships 

Tap into a businesses network of customers to build your own customer base. 

• Dominos partners with Days Inn & Travel Lodge and put Domino’s cards in each hotel room 
• Rolls Royce partners with Country Clubs
  • Rolls Royce doesn’t pay them anything, the benefit for the country club is the experience they can give to their customers 
• Casper and West Elm Furniture Company
  • They’re the mattresses on all of the beds because West Elm doesn’t sell mattresses 

Increase the value of their business to their customers (like Rolls Royce) or have a fee to promote it (Dominos), or have a revenue share. You can also look for companies that are already in these partnerships and make a better deal for them. 

• For example, another mattress company could give West Elm Furniture Company more revenue share and replace Casper

#2: Tap The Curiously Powerful Effect of Butterfly Leverage 

Butterfly leverage is all about finding ways to make more money off of one product or service. 

What are all of the ways you can monetize something that you’re doing? Each time you’re going to do something, look for other opportunities to monetize. 

For example, you can turn one event into several events and create a 7-figure ROI. T&C did this with Richard Branson. 

• Hire Richard Branson to speak at T&C 
• Offer a private reception with Branson at $15,000/ticket
  • $300,000 in profit that goes to Richard Branson’s foundation (we didn’t have to pay out-of-pocket to get him here) 
  • Anyone who got a ticket becomes a War Room prospect (20 prospects added) 
• Offer a private business lunch with Branson
  • We offered a win a seat at lunch with Richard Branson contests 
  • Got 1,522 pixels
• Business Lunch Live Podcast Episode featuring Branson
  • Led to 2,372 podcast subscribers 
  • Put us in the Top 200 Worldwide Charts 
• Sold 619 T&C tickets via Sir Richard Branson coupon code
  • $330,000 in revenue 
• Sold 728 more via speaker announcements
  • Every speaker at the show wanted to be identified as sharing the stage with Richard Branson 
  • They all emailed their list to show this off 
  • $720,000 in revenue 

The end effect of all of this was an additional $1.5 million dollars. 

#3: Structure To “Sell The Eggs” And Keep The Geese 

This allows us to sell one part of our business without losing all of the momentum we’ve created over the past few years. Essentially, we’re spinning off of our operation assets and keeping our platform. 

For example: T&C sold a domain name, an attendee list, and a trademark to Clarion Partners. We kept the sponsorship sales company, the media company (DigitalMarketer), our mastermind (War Room), and our staffing company (no employees went with the sale of the company). 

Our next step in the event world is to partner with Brendon Burchard to acquire half of his Expert’s Academy. Our leverage was to bring our sponsorship company, media company, and event staffing to the partnership. What did we do? Took T&C out of the picture and replaced it with Expert’s Academy. Next year, we can do the same thing with a different event. It’s not a formula of selling our eggs but keeping our goose. 

Clarion Partners is already interested in buying that event. We have a machine that can turn itself on to event after event to create new assets. 

Structure like this so you never end up without a platform. 

#4: Scale Most Impactful Activities, Eliminate Least Impactful Activities, And Verticalize 

First think about the kinds of businesses that you have. There are 4 types:

When you systemize and analyze what you’re doing like this it helps you make good decisions around what to focus on for leverage in the future. 

Questions to ask yourself: 

• What are the most impactful activities you enjoy right now? 
• What least impactful activities can we eliminate? 
• What additional vertical can you expand your most impactful activities into? 

#5: Grow Through Acquisitions 

There are 4 steps to acquire for growth. 

Step 1: Decide which types of businesses to acquire. 

• Acquire your competitor to get them out of the market 
• Acquire media
  • Facebook group 
  • LinkedIn account 
  • YouTube account 
• Acquire for a team 
• Buy a company with products or services 
• Consolidate the supply and distribution chain 
• Acquire intellectual property (IP)
  • Customer list

Step 2: Buy businesses for nothing down. 

8 Business Purchase Strategies: 

• Owner carry
  • Buy a company for $X if they will carry back the financing and let you pay it back over time 
  • You can add the option of giving interest 
• Earn-out
  • Based on the performance going forward you can get additional money for the company you sold 
  • If you’re buying the company it reduces the risk 
• Swaps
  • Swap stock or assets in one company 
• Asset-based lending
  • Buy the company but have the company pay for itself through assets they already have 
• Split equity
• Self-liquidating payments
  • Payment equal to what you know you can make back 
• Baseline
  • Offer the first $3 million that comes in as the baseline and after you do your magic, everything on top is split 50/50 and after 3 years if the 50/50 is equal we throw away that baseline 
• Pipe wrench
  • If you contribute more than 10% of the customers to another company
  • Don’t build their brand for them 
  • Give me equity in your company 

Step 3: Find the exit multiple for each profit center. 

Find the multiple for your industry and pivot your business to the highest multiple possible. Here’s a #V/sales business valuation chart that shows what multiple your business is: 

Step 4: Reposition toward the highest exit multiple. 

Which exit multiple creates the greatest exit value? For example, 584 

DigitalMarketer’s looks this: 

Our multiple went from 0.91 in 2014 to 7.73 just by changing what we did.

The post Achieving Unicorn Growth: 5 Rapid Customer Acquisition Strategies Guaranteed To Drive Massive Results appeared first on DigitalMarketer.